The benefits of cloud computing today are too compelling to overlook. Increased collaboration, cost efficiency, flexibility, scalability, heightened security, and decreased capital expense, are just a few reasons why migrating to the cloud has become more of a necessity than a consideration. It used to be that companies were hesitant to move data to the cloud because of concerns about security. Today, they are more likely to move it to be more secure. Cloud security is a major priority for cloud providers, and now a convincing argument for moving to the cloud.

The question for those organizations considering migration becomes which type of cloud is the best match for your technology, business objectives, and environment?

Reports from a recent study by McAfee, show that 93% of businesses use some type of cloud service. To determine which is the ideal approach for your business, it’s best to understand the options.

Public Cloud

There are many benefits to using infrastructure and services that are publicly available. Use of the public cloud can be optimal for small to mid-size businesses as it is relatively simple to deploy. Resources can also be offered on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, making it very scalable. Because the infrastructure is shared among different users and businesses and there are very few upfront costs, organizations can significantly reduce their IT budget. Due to the broad network of servers, the public cloud also delivers significant reliability.

Top concerns of use with the public cloud are performance and security. Though most IT professionals believe that the cloud is safer than traditional IT systems, there remains some hesitancy with the public cloud. There are fewer geographical regulations on public cloud servers, meaning your server could be in a different country and under different restrictions. Additionally, surges in internet use can impact data transmissions. For this reason, some experts recommend private cloud use if performance is absolutely critical.

Private Cloud

A private cloud delivers all the advantages of the public cloud, but is dedicated to a specific organization. Because of the proprietary infrastructure, private clouds are easily customized.

Private clouds can deliver an increased level of security for businesses that are highly regulated or require complete control over applications and data. Depending on a company’s existing technology, infrastructure, and budget, the private cloud can either be implemented in-house or it can be outsourced. Though the cost to transition to a private cloud is higher than the public cloud option, in the long term there are still significant cost savings over purchasing dedicated servers or hosting your own servers.

Some of the key downsides to the use of a private cloud are the costs involved (as compared to public cloud) and due to heightened security, it can be more difficult for employees to gain access to information remotely.

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid Cloud deployment has become attractive to many businesses due to the complexity of their existing architecture. This approach is a blend of private and public cloud use and can be an excellent choice for larger businesses that are required to keep critical data behind their firewall, but also want to leverage the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud for applications that may be less sensitive.

In reference to upcoming initiatives, 55% of the 2017 IT priorities study respondents stated hybrid cloud deployment when asked which deployment model they would use.

Many IT experts argue that advances in private cloud technology haven’t been able to keep up with public cloud platforms, and if private cloud innovation isn’t evolving at the same rate, it may not make sense for businesses to take the private cloud approach exclusively.

For example, the world’s largest public cloud provider is Amazon Web Services (AWS), and based on reports from Synergy Research Group, AWS is “vastly overpowering its competition. AWS has launched more than 1,000 new features in the last nine years and dropped prices more than 50 times since it launched. Many experts agree that it’s difficult for private cloud technology to keep up with growth like this and it doesn’t make sense for businesses to miss out on this level of advancement.

For most organizations, the benefits of cloud computing are no longer in question and the move is inevitable. Migrating your business to the cloud should be approached in a practical way that allows you to take advantage of the full array of benefits while minimizing disruption to your operations. A trusted Managed Services Provider (MSP) in the cloud space can be a tremendous advantage to ensuring a successful migration. Cloud MSPs also have the deep expertise necessary for the ongoing management and optimization of your cloud environment, allowing your team to focus on core business objectives.

If you’re using Liferay 6.1 or below, then you might be aware that Liferay ended their 6.1EE support last month. With version 7.0EE set for release later this year, many businesses have an upgrade decision to make: whether to upgrade to 6.2EE or wait for the much anticipated version 7, which includes a completely new look and feel, new product and control menus, enhanced image selection experience, improved document management capabilities, and much more!

If your organization is an early adopter of the latest and greatest software, then waiting for Liferay 7.0 and upgrading then may be the right move for you. However, many other organizations prefer to wait until the initial kinks associated with any new major release have been worked out before deciding to upgrade. If you fall into that latter category, then upgrading to Liferay 6.2 now may be the better option.

For those that are considering a Liferay 6.2 upgrade, we’ve compiled a list of the top seven reasons through most noted features that we feel will help maximize your Liferay implementation…

#1: Mobile Device Preview & Responsive Design

Liferay 6.2 has done a spectacular job with its new mobile support features. And as businesses worldwide are seeking to strengthen their mobile presence, Liferay 6.2’s Mobile Device Preview and Responsive Design helps simplify the process and easily tops the list as the best reason to upgrade.

Liferay 6.2’s support of responsive themes means that sites can now automatically adapt to the appropriate screen size of the mobile device or tablet that’s accessing the portal pages. The power of this feature lies in the ability for it to address tablets and mobile devices at the same time, allowing the page structure and layout to dynamically change based on the screen size of the visiting device.

In addition, Liferay administrators and authors can preview site pages on mobile devices without the need for a physical device to test the site, allowing any changes to be easily previewed prior to going live. This enhances the ability to test and optimize for various mobile devices in a much more efficient way.

#2: New Control Panel UI

The main goal of the new control panel is user-friendliness, by addressing some of the challenges that have been growing since its introduction in Liferay 5.2, including:

Loss of context

Complexity

Mix of portal-wide, site, and personal account administration

Outdated UI

Empty first page

Non-intuitive navigation

Liferay 6.2 took steps to address these Control Panel issues by making it much more intuitive and user-friendly, through restructured navigation, more intuitive UI, and reorganized portlets.

#3: Enhanced Calendar

Liferay 6.2’s new calendar has several enhancements to benefit both internal and external users. Some of these features have even been implemented based on feedback from existing Liferay customers, which include:

Multiple Shareable Calendars

Resource Reservations

Custom Event Types

#4: Web Content Management Enhancements

With Liferay 6.2, users can now organize their Web content in folders and sub-folders, similar to documents and media.

#5: Drag-n-Drop Support for Document Uploads

Liferay Portal users can now drag a document from their desktop and drop it into the browser for document and media uploads.

#6: Application Display Templates

Application Display Templates (ADT) are similar to site and page templates, but at the portlet level. This allows custom templates for Liferay applications to be created and portlets to be re-skinned.

From a user perspective, this feature simplifies customization of the portlet display. And for developers, this saves them from having to modify the portlet configuration code every time a new setting is required.

#7: Improved Staging and Import/Export Features

These improvements will not only facilitate moving portlet data between environments, but also assist with development.

Liferay 6.2 Staging and Import/Export enhancements include:

Simplified configurations

Providing of status during publishing process

Providing of summarized information before and after publishing

Increased support of import/export scenarios

Well, there you have it, the top seven features of Liferay 6.2 that we think have the largest impact on your existing implementation!

If you need even more reasons, read our full white paper for 11 total reasons to upgrade! And if you’re already planning an upgrade, check out how Rivet Logic can help in our datasheet!

The buzz around mobile has been around for a while and isn’t going anywhere, and with good reason. When over 90% of adults have their mobile phone within arm’s reach 24/7, it’s apparent that as a society, we’ve become largely dependent on our mobile devices. I bet the last time you forgot your phone at home, you felt like a part of you was missing, didn’t you? Well, you’re not alone.

With the population spending more and more time on their mobile devices, businesses can no longer afford to ignore their mobile experience. With an unlimited amount of information at their fingertips, consumers expect the ability to quickly access whatever info they need at that moment. And that’s not just limited to consumers. In B2B environments, business users are researching products and services on their smartphones, and performing tasks that would typically be done on desktops.

This requires a different approach to strategizing for mobile, a mobile-first approach. The question is no longer “should I build a responsive site or a native mobile app?” It’s not a matter of one versus the other. Businesses today need to have a mobile friendly website, period. It’s what your audience expects.

The question now becomes, “is mobile web enough?” To bring your customer engagement to the next level, it’s a good idea to consider a native mobile app. If you’re still not convinced, here are five advantages of mobile apps that makes the UX superior:

Better handling of touch, gestures, and swipes – Side to side swiping, while very popular on mobile apps and desktop sites, doesn’t work as well on mobile websites

Faster and more responsive – While mobile sites download the experience and data for each page through verbose HTML, mobile apps already contain most of the experience definition and only need to download the data

Easy to continue where you left off – Mobile apps allow users to carry on tasks that span over long periods of time without having to log back in each time

Tighter device integration – Mobile apps are much better equipped at handling features like geo-location, camera, and push notifications. While HTML5 is capable of supporting some of these device integrations, it’s not to the same degree and is often a power drainer

Integration with other apps – It’s much easier and seamless to launch from one app to another app, than from an app to a mobile web app (take using your Facebook login to login to Pinterest for example)

Well, there you have it, five advantages that native mobile apps have over their mobile web counterparts. Of course, this doesn’t mean everyone should go and replace all their web apps with native apps. Each business still needs to determine what works best for them. But this provides some areas for consideration the next time you’re trying to decide whether or not to build that mobile app!

At the beginning of every year, the web is flooded with blog posts, articles, and infographics with predictions and trends of what’s in store for the year ahead.

This year, there are a few key trends that seem to consistently appear in every prediction, and they all seem to revolve around mobile, social, personalization/targeting, and analytics.

Not surprisingly, with mobile on an unrelenting rise, organizations large and small are shifting towards a mobile first strategy. And as we’re surrounded by more and more digital content, organizations need to find creative ways to grab users’ attentions, through delivery of targeted and personalized content, and with social features that encourage audience participation.

In this age of the customer, consumers expect their online experiences to be seamless and omni-channel, filled with consistent and contextual data, all the while engaging them through bi-directional conversations.

Traditionally social content and social enablement has been handled with a collection of individual platforms, perhaps one for reviews, another for discussion forums, yet another for ratings and so on. Having content stuck in such silos limits the value we can expect to derive and deliver from our social platforms. While traditional platforms have helped facilitate conversations and drive greater engagement with customers, these individual channels can often seem unrelated and disjoint.

“Vital Content” and Its Production Challenges

Motivating engagement and participation in the content lifecycle establishes a lasting and valuable relationship with your customers. To build this kind of deep relationship with your customers you must give them a voice and provide them with content and functionality that is vital to their needs. The answer can be found in a combination of process and technology designed to personalize the experience, gather insight, and surface connected content.

This process produces a new content class — Vital Content — resulting from content creators and consumers building a deeper relationship as each learns more about the other. The outcome of this process keeps users actively engaged, connected longer, and produces a more meaningful experience.

However, traditional solutions fail to build an ongoing relationship with the audience because they fail to keep the right content in front of the right people and encourage engagement that breathes new life into the content. Users today want, and expect, a personalized experience that is consistent and contextually relevant and that spans across their entire customer journey. They shouldn’t have to re-educate at each engagement event on their likes, dislikes or previous history. Instead, they should be presented with relevant content that addresses their needs and triggers new engagement. The process of building a relationship with your user or customer is ongoing, and technology should enable that relationship to prosper.

Building Relationships Through Metadata

So how is this accomplished? Since content, comments, ratings and other social content are essentially the same, by connecting them with metadata, it’s possible to build relationships between them, pulling them out of their traditional silos. Through the application of metadata such as tagging, content curators and end users are able to create relationships between any piece of content or commentary, regardless of the source. These cross-referenced pieces can then be dynamically embedded, restructured and linked together in endless configurations.

With these ends in mind, Crafter Software has created Crafter Social, an innovative platform leveraging MongoDB, for creating Vital Content to help organizations maximize their customer engagement and the strength of their customer relationships. Crafter Social enables an increased level of engagement with the user while enhancing the overall experience. Furthermore, requirements will evolve as the user’s engagement increases over time. Crafter Social provides a flexible approach built on a system of relationships, and as these relationships grow, it provides the tools to take action on new data types and sources.

The internet has revolutionized the way companies market their products and services today, and one of the biggest changes is how businesses are leveraging their websites to market their online presence. In a competitive digital world, the key to success is reaching potential customers and driving them to your website.

In a webinar earlier this year, we discussed how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a top priority in today’s growing world of technology reliance on web-based platforms, and how Liferay’s newest features can be used to implement SEO-friendly dynamic pages, illustrated by a real world customer example.

What is SEO?

For those who aren’t familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it’s the process of affecting the visibility of a website or web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid “organic” search results. Unlike paid search results, like Google Adwords, where you’re essentially paying for your URL’s to display in a favorable position, SEO involves the natural algorithms that sort the results.

Organizations are always trying various SEO techniques to increase high value traffic to their sites from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Common SEO methods include getting indexed, controlling the crawl, and increasing prominence. It’s important that your page is highly relevant to the keywords that users would use in their search for that page.

SEO Strategy Considerations

When determining an SEO strategy, there are several important factors to consider:

Controlling Meta Information

First and foremost, it’s important to ensure that all of the properties being used to describe your page are relevant and descriptive of the page’s content. HTML pages contain metadata – title, meta tags, keywords, etc. – and search engines look at this metadata through sophisticated algorithms to determine its value, which is then used to score the page.

Liferay allows users to control the metadata for each page, along with the ability for localization. For example, the US page can have metadata in English and a Chinese page could have the metadata in Mandarin in order to maximize the score.

Site Map Protocol

Another feature that search engines provide is the ability to show searching users a site map of the website directly in the search result page to help them find what they’re looking for faster. For example, if you searched AT&T in Google, you will see search results for AT&T along with the site map, as shown in the image below. Liferay has an out-of-the-box capability of pushing your sitemap out to Google and Yahoo using the Site Map Protocol.

Friendly URLs

A good SEO strategy also involves the use of friendly URLs. Your URL patterns need to be descriptive of the content. Out-of-the-box, Liferay URLs in many cases aren’t good enough as they contain a lot of URL parameters. However, Liferay allows for the creation of custom friendly URLs through the Friendly URL Mapper to solve the problem.

SEO Friendly Sliders/Carousels

Lastly, many organizations struggle with the issue of SEO friendly sliders and carousels. In a nutshell, a page rendering carousels should only have the content of the relevant slide instead of all the slides. When users perform a search, the search engine crawls through each slide and indexes it as part of the same page. The challenge is tricking the search engine into viewing each slide as a separate page, while maintaining the animation.

For example, if a user searches for something that lies in slide 3 of a carousel, and the search results take them to slide 1 where the information isn’t relevant to what they were looking for, it can cause confusion and frustration. It’s easy to see why this is something companies want to avoid as it can result in a poor user experience that could deter the user from visiting the site again.

The solution lies in the URL. By creating unique URLs for each slide of the carousel, search engines can treat and index them as separate pages, making them SEO friendly.

To maintain the proper carousel transitions between slides, the slides are linked so that a simple AJAX call back to the server allows users to view all the carousel slides. In addition, all of the carousel slides are managed in one Liferay Web content article. This way, only one slide in the carousel is rendered during rendering, preventing any false positives when search engines are indexing the page. With this solution, you can still have carousels without sacrificing the SEO friendliness of a site.

Real World Customer Example – Sensus

Sensus is a global enterprise in utility infrastructure systems and resource conservation. For its global website, products are organized in a way as illustrated in the diagram below – where sensus.com contained multiple country sites, each with multiple divisions, and those with their own product lines, each with multiple products.

However, in reality, the associations between these entities were not as cleanly hierarchical as the diagram implies. In fact, all the entities could be associated with one another, as shown in the following diagram.

This presented the biggest challenge as it meant that a truly hierarchical representation for the content behind Divisions, Product Lines, Products and Solutions could not be created. And from an SEO perspective, all this content still needed to be searchable, and needed to be in a hierarchy that search engines understood.

Templates and Page Types Are the Answer

To solve this problem, we leveraged templates, which helped content managers organize their content in a way where it’s reusable, without losing the site map and structure of the content.

Liferay’s built-in rich WCM capability allowed us to divide a page into building blocks. For example, a product line page would be divided into the following sections – overview, products, and associated solutions.

We also created page types, where a single Liferay page can display as many articles as necessary for a particular page type. For Sensus, we had page types for Division, Product Line, and Product.

What about SEO?

When addressing SEO, the answer was in the method of content delivery. We needed to make sure that content authoring and delivery were decoupled to maintain SEO friendliness of each country’s site.

We achieved this through a process where content authors didn’t touch the Liferay pages. Instead, all they had to do was create Web forms and tag each article using Liferay categories, in turn capturing the hierarchy. That way, the article can surface in various places throughout the site based on how it’s categorized, allowing content authors to maintain a single source of truth for the content and also the hierarchy in the information architecture on the delivery side. Now when search engines scan through the pages and come up with a searchable index, the structure makes sense and there’s no loss of content organization.

As a result of this solution that enables the creation of a global website with shared content, we also encountered some SEO challenges that were specific to Liferay – HTML Titles and Breadcrumbs. As discussed earlier, search engines expect a page’s HTML title to be relevant to what’s on the page. However, since we’re using page types, where each page is displaying multiple products, we couldn’t have the same title for each product page, and Liferay out-of-the-box controls the page title based on the page type. Similarly, Liferay’s Breadcrumb capability had to show hierarchy of the content.

Both of these challenges were solved through a plug-in that enabled us to intercept the HTML Title and Breadcrumb generation code and replace it with dynamic logic so that it made sense for search engines.

In summary, SEO is something that’s becoming increasingly important for all public facing sites to focus on. A key SEO success factor lies in the strategy that must be defined early on in the planning phases of a project to ensure maximum SEO friendliness, and Liferay as a CMS provides a great tool for SEO that can satisfy almost all requirements.